Lagos — Information and Communications Minister Dora Akunyili has said the ministry will make recommendations to the Federal Executive Council

(FEC) on the call for the merger of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC) before the end of December.

Akunyili, who stated this over the weekend in Lagos in an interactive session with journalists, said the merger of the NCC and NBC would guard against functions overlapping.

She expressed the belief that though frictions between the two agencies had led to calls for the two to be merged, the merger could only be done through a legislative process and not through fiat.

NCC and NBC are the two main regulatory agencies in broadcast and telecoms but function overlap occurs in the area of licencing of spectrums.

Some had called for a merger to ensure that the communications industry has a single regulatory body as obtainable in other parts of the world.

On his part, Chairman/Editor-in-Chief of THISDAY Newspaper, Mr. Nduka Obaigbena, last week questioned the relevance of NBC as a regulator in an age where technology has created a borderless world.

Obaigbena was delivering a lecture to participants at the Executive Intelligence Management Course at the Institute for Security Studies in Abuja.

He called for the merging of NBC with NCC because, according to him, NBC has lost its relevance because of nature of modern news media.

The duty of NBC is to regulate and license broadcasting stations but with advent of the Internet, voice and video can be transmitted from anywhere in the world, thereby rendering NBC irrelevant.

A merger with the NCC, he advised, would be more appropriate for management, including frequency and spectrum allocations.

"Technology has changed the media. I wonder what the role of the NBC is anymore since all videos and voice can be delivered online. Then what are they regulating or licensing? NBC's time is gone. What we need is merging it with the NCC so that together they can properly manage frequencies," he said.

On the proposed sale of the Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL), Akunyili stated that though NITEL had been a disappointment, like many other national projects such as Nigeria Airways, government is doing something to bring something good out of the organisation.

She said with NITEL valued at over $600 million, Nigeria would try and get as much value as it could out of the company.

Describing NITEL as a big national resource, the government, according to her, does not joke with the organisation and is threading carefully with the issue.

On the status of the 2.3GHz spectrum sale, Akunyili said NCC was working towards a repeat licensing process of the spectrum as ordered by President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua. She said 21 days notice would be given when the time for the licensing process to commence begins.

On the re-branding project, Akunyili said the National Re-branding Project is a systematic response to address the country's image problem.

The re-branding initiative, according to her, draws heavily from the internal components of the previous image project, "Heart of Africa," and is conceived as an internal process to address Nigeria's negative image.

She said it is designed to be people-centred through the paradigm shift- PPPP - Private, Public and People Partnership.

Disclosing that plans had been put in place to set up rebranding clubs in schools across the country, Akunyili stated that the campaign is a holistic one and homegrown geared at bringing about attitudinal change, re-orientation, reviving cultural values and instilling a renewed spirit of patriotism and hope in all Nigerians.